Why the Future Belongs to the Intelligent Development Life Cycle

By Mohit Bahl, Senior Director, Solution Consulting at Material

For decades, the software development life cycle (SDLC) has been the industry’s blueprint for delivering with predictability and consistency, ensuring projects stay aligned with defined goals and quality standards. But in the current hyper-accelerated digital landscape, where speed and complexity dominate the competitive agenda, the rigid, sequential model has become a bottleneck to innovation.

To overcome the limitations of the traditional SDLC, enterprises are increasingly leveraging Generative AI to make software development more adaptive and insight-driven. This shift has become a primary driving force reshaping how software is imagined, built and scaled across industries. Forward-looking organisations are rearchitecting the entire value chain around AI-driven innovation.

An AI-Assisted Approach Delivers Efficiency. Transformation Demands More.

The current generation of AI tools has been delivering on its promise: development cycles are faster, quality assurance is stronger and teams are achieving measurable gains across industries. Organisations are embedding these capabilities across their delivery pipelines. Yet, the core bottlenecks of sequential, human-driven workflows remain.

As enterprises push beyond incremental gains, the next phase of transformation will demand more than efficiency. It calls for a shift from AI that assists discrete tasks to AI that directs and manages the entire value stream, from concept to deployment, learning and optimising at every stage. This marks the evolution from rigid processes to a dynamic, intelligent system. At Material, we are actively exploring this direction, which is reflected in what we call the Intelligent Development Life Cycle (IDLC), where AI orchestrates the full life cycle based on human intent rather than constrained by manual intervention.

Introducing the IDLC – The Intelligent Development Life Cycle 

This next phase demands a guiding framework for transformation, a ‘north star’ that shows how AI can lead the entire development life cycle. The IDLC redefines software/product delivery as a dynamic, adaptive system.

In this envisioned model, specialised AI agents that can code, design, test and audit security vulnerabilities collaborate in real time through a continuous, adaptive loop, creating a process that is inherently proactive. As a result, it will be capable of anticipating and addressing risks upstream, establishing a smarter, more resilient foundation for building digital products and software.

The visual below illustrates the current state of the AI-assisted SDLC alongside the future state, AI-led IDLC model:

The shift to AI orchestration rebalances the human-machine equation, allowing human expertise to focus entirely on setting the vision and ensuring quality, while the machine handles the complex operational and dependency management of the project lifecycle. The key impacts of this shift are illustrated in the table below.

Where We Are Today: Early Experiments and Clear Potential

Across enterprise environments, early experiments show that AI-led orchestration is not a distant concept but an achievable reality.

In a recent design project, for example, the Material team implemented an AI orchestration framework in which a central orchestrator delegates tasks to specialised sub-agents. The framework autonomously interprets Figma design files to generate user interfaces, accelerating a traditionally manual step and reducing human dependency. It represents a tangible shift from AI assisting the process to AI directing it.

Early implementations like this are paving the path toward the fully AI-led IDLC, where the same orchestration model is envisioned to extend across the entire product lifecycle – designing, coding, testing and deploying in coordinated loops. We continue to refine the approach through active experimentation and by co-developing solutions with our clients.

Implications for Teams and Organisations 

The rise of AI-led orchestration signals an evolution in how value is created and delivered across the development lifecycle – resulting in key benefits for teams and organisations that embrace this shift.

• Continuous improvement: With every iteration, AI agents learn and adapt, compounding productivity and quality gains over time.

• Faster time-to-market: AI agents orchestrate workflows and minimise hand-offs, enabling faster delivery cycles and greater agility.

• Higher resilience: Risks are identified and resolved earlier in the process, leading to more reliable, higher-performing products.

• Scalable by design: Multiple AI-led cycles can be run in parallel, allowing product development to keep pace with business ambitions.

The Next Evolution of AI-Led Development

The Intelligent Development Life Cycle represents more than a refinement of today’s workflows – it marks a fundamental shift in how digital products will be conceived, built and evolved. In the IDLC model, AI is not an accessory to traditional processes but the engine that continuously interprets intent, orchestrates specialised agents and optimises outcomes end-to-end. Humans steer the vision; AI ensures that vision is executed with precision, speed and adaptability.

If your team is exploring what it means to operationalise AI – not just embed it – now is the moment to begin that conversation. Learn how the shift from SDLC to IDLC can help your organisation lead the next era of software innovation.